This is the second edition of World Soccer to be published during the 2013-14 European season – and we still don’t know where Gareth Bale and Wayne Rooney will be playing when the Champions League group stage kicks off in mid-September. Bale and Rooney have not been included in our Players to Watch (page 47), for obvious reasons. While the length of the summer transfer window is a minor inconvenience for the production schedule of a monthly magazine, the wider issue needs to be addressed. The window was originally conceived to bring transfers in line with UEFA’s competition deadlines. But it has succeeded only in boosting the bank balances of agents, while unsettling most clubs. The sensible thing to do would be to limit the window to the month of July, or even a fortnight within July, thereby allowing clubs to kick off the league season at the start of August with settled squads, and everyone else with their sanity intact. Bale or no Bale, we will publish our guide to the Champions League next month. As always, it will also be available in digital format (right). See you then